Following our tipsy tour of Ha Long Bay we took the night train from Hanoi up to Lau Cai, a little town perched right on the Chinese border (James and I will head back there in two days time to cross into Yunnan), then grabbed a bus up to Sa Pa, which has been our base for the past week. Sa Pa is a very popular tourist spot thanks to its magnificent location (1600 metres above sea level in the shadow of Fansipan, Vietnam’s highest mountain), and also due to the large concentration of ethnic minorities living nearby, many of whom descend on Sa Pa daily to act as guides to local villages or sell beautiful, gaudy handmade textiles.

From the moment our van started its ascent through the valley we were surrounded by mile upon mile of green – that’s the best I can do to describe it here, everything is ridiculously green and fresh – and by the time we reached the town itself, despite the drizzle and the thin layer of low cloud that had descended over Fansipan, the views had become absolutely breathtaking.

From Sapa, there are seemingly endless miles of mountain roads and muddy footpaths to explore, which is mostly what we’ve been doing all week – in fact, my body has almost shut down in protest over the unaccustomed exertion. James and I have been for two long hikes down into the valley, passing through H’Mong and Red Dau villages full of brightly dressed women and children, then climbing back through the mountains on tiny, muddy little tracks – every time you turn around you’re hit by another stunning view of jagged mountain peaks, undulating streams and insanely green paddy fields that seem to roll on forever.

The undisputed highlight of the week, though, was today’s mountain bike ride from Lai Chau to Sin Chau and back to Sapa, which (thanks to the joy of a one-way lift in a minibus) was an unadulterated speed-fest down nearly 30km of vehicle-free road with less than 5km of uphill to disturb the velocity. The only things worth slowing down for were the heart-in-mouth hair pin bends and the spectacular views of the valley rolling away from the road as we hurtled down the pass with Mount Fanzipan towering over us.  Immense.

As if things couldn’t get any better up here, there’s a real, actual pub – The Red Dragon - that sells carbohydrate laden shepherd’s pie to keep you going - we are almost regulars. Happily, the presence of this establishment means that, for the first time on the trip, I can bestow the highest possible honour on Sa Pa: it’s nearly as good as the Yorkshire Dales. This is not an accolade I throw about lightly, and to qualify for it, three strict criteria must be met:

1. The climate must be tempramental enough to demand that you leave for a walk carrying shorts, t-shirt and thermals, in case of every eventuality

2. You must be able to finish a long, painful, hilly hike/bike ride and find yourself within 100 metres of a pub.

3. The scenery must look at least as good, if not better, through a thick, drizzly, cloudy haze, as it does when the sun is out.

Check, check and check. As my very Yorkshire grandad would have said, it’s smashing up here. Now, where was that pint of stout?

 

Here’s some photos from our short jolly to Ha Long Bay. We spent a few days on a boat cruising amongst the karsks, caves and floating villages, got drunk on Vodka that was cheaper than water, played silly drinking games with fellow travellers, swam in the sea (until the jellyfish closed in) and hiked up a huge hill with the mother of all hangovers. All in a days work for the intrepid, fearless explorers ;-)

 

The following day we cycled to Tam Coc and visited three caves set in an inland waterway.  The morning mist was still clinging to the emerald hills as we gently paddled through the water.  Apparently the film Indochine was shot here (not that I’d know, as it’s a love story ‘an all, eugh).  We also tottered around a Buddhist temple set in a hill-top cave before cycling north to Hoa Lu, the former capital of the early Vietnamese kingdom.  We took a stroll around the ruins and headed back home, and onto Hanoi.

 

Hanoi is one hell of place.  It’s a huge, cosmopolitan city that still preserves Vietnamese culture in its heart.  We stayed in the old quarter – the former trades of ship sail and drums skin makers have given way to silk and liquor shops, but the narrow streets still retain plenty of charm.  As with many asian cities, the streets are particularly lively in the early evenings – families gather in street kitchens to eat freshly cooked food and impromptu ‘Bia Hoi’ (beer stands) appear on street corners, serving up ice cold beer for 10 pence a glass.  The food in Hanoi is amazing, it’s fresh, tasty and cheap.  Our breakfast of choice was Bun Bo – noodles with beef, salad and beansprouts topped with fried onions and peanuts.  We also discovered an amazing street kitchen selling the local speciality of Bun Cha – grilled minced pork with a huge bowl of cold noodles, a sweet broth, salad and a mountain of freshly cooked spring rolls.  What the place lacked in hygiene the food made up for in flavour (and quantity of spring rolls).

Aside from eating, we also visited Hanoi’s sights.  We popped into the fine arts museum, stuffed with amazing artwork and really pretty asian paintings.  We wondered over the road to the temple of literature – home to a handful of pagodas, a Confucian sanctuary and now a university.  One hot day we decided to visit Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum – after walking a few kilometres to find the bloody entrance, and after putting bags in one cloakroom and cameras for another, and after queuing the in blazing heat for 30 minutes we entered the imposing building.  It was rather surreal – it was 36 degrees outside yet the inside of the building was ice cold.  We walked up a flight of stairs in into the main chamber where Uncle Ho’s body was on display behind a glass cabinet, guarded by four soldiers in spotless white uniforms.  Even the Vietnamese visitors – the masters of the queue-busting-elbow-barges formed an orderly queue in the presence of their national hero as we shuffled past his body.  We emerged into the beating afternoon sun and headed back to the guesthouse only to discover the power was off – no air conditioning, no fan and no breeze.  It’s the hottest place we’ve been so far on our trip and we almost melted away that evening.

Vietnam’s capital had far more charm than I’d ever expected.  We’d been warned that it was hectic and full of opportunists, but we’d managed to escape unscathed and well-fed, if a little sweaty.

 

Dong Hoi is a fairly innocuous little town but we very nearly fell out with it within an hour of arriving due to the difficulty of finding a place to stay: thanks to a friendly Vietnamese law, some hotels are not permitted to allow foreigners and apparently this is the case with 90% of the establishments Dong Hoi – everywhere we asked, bashful shrugging and half-hearted head shaking was the standard response. We traipsed around for an hour feeling like social pariahs until we finally found a place that would take whiteys and collapsed into bed, crossing our fingers that getting to the caves the following day would not be quite such a battle.

No such luck. The only place that would arrange transport was the governemnt tourist office (looked like a nineteen-seventies accountancy firm, staff about as cheerful as Myra Hindley), where we were asked for an insane amount of money to get us there, so we politely declined and began to trawl the streets again in search of a cheaper option. Thankfully, we were rescued by Nam, the cheerful owner of a little coffee shop, who called his mate and persuaded him to drive us there for a much smaller fee.

The Phong Nha caves themselves are the largest cave complex in Asia – 35km of underground caverns and tunnels formed over 400 million years – the first 8km were used as a civilian shelter during the war but the rest of the tunnels weren’t discovered until the nineties when a team of British spelunkers stumbled into them. They are also one of Vietnam’s prime domestic tourist attractions – we didn’t know this until we got to the boat jetty (the caves are only accessible by river) and saw the Armada of little wooden boats settig off down the river, packed to the rafters with raucous families. We paid our entrance fee and joined the melee, much to the delight of the crowd, who were possibly more excited about the presence of four confused foreigners than they were seeing about Asia’s most spectacular cave system.

Despite the happy chaos of people and boats, the caves themselves are awe-inspiring – vast, echoing chambers linked by shadowy underwater canals, tunneling deep into the limestone cliffs. Some areas are lit by phosphorescent spotlights, making the stalagmites look almost ethereal, others are left gloomy and mysterious, looming over the water so that the boats look pathetically small. One we were inside we were able to disembark and wander round the main chamber, feeling like a speck of grit caught in an ancient, immovable old beast, before (rather gratefully) returning to the outside world and heading back to the jetty for lunch.

When we returned from the caves, Nam had booked us onward bus tickets and he even plied us with beer until it arrived. As we drank he explained to us how happy he was to be able to practice speaking English – he ran the cafe seven days a week with his wife and also spent three nights per week at night school learning foreign languages – he wants to visit his brother, who’s a taxi driver in the UK. This seems to be common with all Vietnamese people – they have an incredible capacity to work ridiculously hard and remain very cheerful. I must remember this next time I wincee at the thought of getting a job again.

At nine ‘o’ clock our night bus rumbled up and we stumbled on, headed for Ninh Binh, where we were unceremoniously dumped at four am. This is our base for the next few days while we go and visit some monkeys at an endangered primate rescue centre…hopefully they’ll be a bit friendlier than the last primate I met.

 

After an exhausting four days of, erm, shopping in Hoi An we decided to recharge our batteries and our credit cards with a brief stop at China Beach, since it’s only 18km away on the coastal road to Danang. It turned out to be a great decision and a one night stop over turned into a four day seafood, surf and beer frenzy at what has got to be one of the best beaches ever.

China Beach was a popular surfing haunt with American GIs during the war, but since then it has remained unfathamably, miraculously untouched by development – along a 25km stretch of pristine white sand there are a handful of hotels, one five star resort and a solitary little diamond of a guest house called Hoa’s Place.
We found Hoa’s in our guidebook, where it was described as ‘properly off the beaten track, with some travellers staying for months’, which made me a bit suspicious because descriptions of this kind often seem to translate as ‘doss-house full of scruffy tossers who are too broke/lazy/stoned to move.’ Happily though, none of this applied to Hoa’s: the place is a gem – right on the beach with cheap rooms, food and beer more or less on tap and free surf boards for boys to make themselves look stupid on: best guest house we’ve stayed at in five months.

In the past I’ve never considered myself much of a beach lover – too much sand, too little activity – but on this trip I seem to have become an expert on doing what you’re supposed to do there i.e. not very much. For four days our daily routine was: get up, go for a little trot along the beach (me), faff on the computer (James), have breakfast, lie on the beach, play in the sea, lie on the beach, play in the sea, gorge on seafood, lie on the beach, drink beer, play cards, drink beer, join everybody else for dinner, have a natter, go to bed. No wonder somebody once stayed there for fifteen months.

Eventually we decided that enough was enough and took off to Hue by train – a beautiful journey over the Hai Vanh pass with perfect views over the paddy fields and beaches below us. Hue is the cultural and academic capital of Vietnam and it has a distinctly French look about it; wide tree-lined boulevards, riverside parks and art galleries galore. Yesterday we wandered around the citadel, a huge labyrinth of courtyards, gates, moats and royal enclosures that was built two hundred years ago by a Nguyen Emperor and still dominates the city. The majority of the citadel’s buildings were smashed to smithereens during the war and are now painstakingly being restored by an army of workmen; you can still see bullet holes and mortar scars on the areas that survived. But despite its turbulent history and sublime architecture, the best thing about the citadel is undoubtedly the fact that, for a mere pound, you can dress up as a 19th century mandarin and parade yourself on a throne while Vietnamese tourists to take photos of you. Is it possible to have that much fun at The Tower of London? I think not (see photo section for evidence).

 

I can’t believe it’s nine days since we blogged last – we’ve covered a lot of Vietnam since leaving the comfort of our luxurious hotel in Siagon. We’ve also met up with Rob and Jade, who we first met in Jodhpur in March, and we’re now working our way though Vietnam together.

After Siagon, we headed south to the frenetic town of Can Tho, nestled in the center of the Mekong Delta where the 4000km long river passes by before meeting the South China Sea. Can Tho is the unconventional commercial hub of the Delta; fresh produce arrives here every morning via the network of rivers and natural canals. Trading and bartering still continues every day in the floating markets so we chartered a boat and set off to explore. As we chugged down the river we passed vessels of many shapes and sizes exchanging all manner of fruits, vegetables, animals and materials. We even passed floating cafes and coffin shops. The food in Can Tho was good but I’m still kicking myself for not sampling the ’snake menu’, However I’m sure we’ll find worse later in the trip with China on the horizon…

 

We left Can Tho, had a brief overnight stop in Siagon and took a sleeper coach to Nah Trang – a surprisingly pleasant and well-organised beach resort – and after a couple of weeks of sporadic monsoon rain in Cambodia and Southern Vietnam we were ready to hit the beach. In between topping up our tans and cooling off in the sea we found time to explore the ruined Cham Towers (where I made a wish by gripping a lucky 4 foot high granite penis) and visit a huge white Buddha who peers down over Nah Trang from his hill-top pedestal. The highlight of our stay was our trip to the Thap Ba hot springs. Here we indulged ourselves in a wooden bathtub filled with hot theraputic mud before hopping into mineral water from the local spring. It took about two hours to detox our bodies of impurities and about two minutes to re-toxify them with traffic fumes from the cycle home.

 

We’re now writing from Hoi An – the picturesque shopping capital of Vietnam. It’s possibly the prettiest town I’ve ever visited – a fusion of Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese and European culture and architecture. The narrow streets are lined with colourful Chinese lanterns and there are over 500 tailors here with windows full of beautiful clothes and fine silks. We’ve been here for four days and so far I’ve had two wonderful suits and four shirts tailored and Jeannie’s bought three ornate silk dresses, but our little splurge is just a drop in the finest Cashmere ocean compared to Rob and Jade, who between them have helped a number of local tailors and cobblers retire to the Maldives. Aside from shopping we’ve wandered the charming little streets and visited scores of houses, pagodas, galleries and restaurants. Today we hired motorbikes and trekked out through the Vietnamese countryside to My Son, the home of a large site containing more Cham ruins. The ruins look a little similar to Angkor or Champasak, but crafted from red bricks. Unfortunately they’re in pretty poor condition as most were bombed by the US during the war.

Tomorrow we’re leaving our quaint Chinese guest house and moving a short distance up the coast to Non Nuoc beach. In other news, I forgot to put on sunblock today so I’m now sporting an amazing pair of farmer arms.

 

Saigon is hot, hectic, ambitious, smart and nothing like the mythologised image of Vietnam that’s been established by one too many films about ‘Nam’ during the war. It has a young, gorgeous population (65% under 35) who seem to divide their time betweeen working, socialising, riding on motorbikes and getting married – I’ve never seen so many brides wandering around. Grandma is obsessed by the Vegas style shot gun chapel opposite the hotel, from which gorgeous girls in meringue-style white dresses continually emerge with small, smug looking grooms.

Aside from bride watching, the four of us have spent a lovely week seeing the sights, eating, frequenting hotel bars, swimming, trying to avoid falling under motorbikes and finding restaurants that serve chips for Grandma.

Only one small fly in the ointment really:  we’ve been under surveillance from the Vietnamese authorities all week. The flu that cannot be named has arrived in Vietnam and it looks like it came in on mum and grandma’s plane…Mum mentioned a sickly looking man on their flight who was wrapped in a blanket with a face mask on, but we didn’t think much of it until we got a polite little note from reception asking us to monitor our temperatures twice a day and hand them at 8am and 4pm. The following day the local news reported 58 cases of pig flu in South Vietnam and we started to get a bit edgy, but the incubation period has passed now and none of us have been quarantined so I think we must be clear.

The old dears depart today and will be reading this in the comfort of West Yorkshire, and we’re returning to our life of relative squalor in the Mekong Delta, about two hours south of Saigon. One more dip in the pool first though…